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SternisheFan snips this news from Tech Radar: "The Surface tablets that Microsoft will start selling on 26 October at Microsoft Stores (and in temporary 'holiday stores' in twelve US cities including New York) are only the first of a planned family of Windows devices and Surface 2.0 is already under development. Although Microsoft corporate communications chief Frank Shaw said recently that calling Surface 'our new family of PCs built to be the ultimate stage for Windows' was no more than 'literary licence' and that there was nothing more than the two tablets already announced, the Surface team is 'currently building the next generation' of 'devices that fully express the Windows vision' — according to more than a dozen job adverts posted on the Microsoft Careers site between June and August."

Obviously they'll take share and make money by making Windows not work as well on the hardware of their OEM competitors. That won't be hard to do as they must write the drivers for the hardware - the OEMs can't - and these days they're streaming updates so they can make your Dell PC gradually progressively worse instead of waiting for a new Windows version. This has been their go-to strategy with software competitors since, I think, 1986.

OEMs have always known that Microsoft did this to software vendors, and they looked away because they were getting theirs. Lotus, Borland, Aldus, Ashton-Tate and many others fell the same way. Well now it's the OEMs turn to play Microsoftball blindfolded and with their legs hobbled, giving their competitor an advanced look at their strategy.

Even Microsoft knows they're an unreliable business partner. This is from their SEC filing: "...our Surface devices will compete with products made by our OEM partners, which may affect their commitment to our platform." "Users may increasingly turn to these [mobile] devices to perform functions that would have been performed by personal computers in the past," "Even if many users view these devices as complementary to a personal computer, the prevalence of these devices may make it more difficult to attract applications developers to our platforms."

This is supposed to happen. The mods are going to go back and forth on this one for a while. Don't worry about me: I have infinite Karma. I can bear it - I do this all the time. I'm actually a honeypot the admins use to detect moderation abuse, among other things. Only the noob astroturfers try that now and they immediately lose their mod privileges and get their IP address flagged for monitoring.

Uhhh...those were under gates, who hasn't been running the show since 1999 and frankly it shows. personally I'd much rather have Gates as he may have been a bastard, but he was a bastard that could build good office OSes.

No dude what we have here is just another chapter in the continuing saga of Steve "I wanna work in Cupertino LOL!" Ballmer, the used car salesman of the corporate world. what we'll get is half assed knockoff that won't work worth a shit and will bomb, simple as that. hell look at the man's track record, Zune, Kin,WinCE, WinPhone, pushing out the X360 with a 2 billion dollar hardware flaw...the man can snatch defeat from victory quicker than the PHB from Dilbert.

So seriously dude, the 90s are over, get over it, okay? windows will stay on X86 which is gonna be like washers and dryers in that nobody will replace until the previous one dies, and if you want someone to be scared of you need to be scared of Brin and Cook, not Ballmer. The days of "the big bad M$" are as gone as the days of "the big bad big blue IBM" are, its over, its done, the fat lady is down the street having a sammich.

Ya wanna know what happens to the OEMs? Here let me break out my crystal ball...Win 8 shits the bed, OEMs demand win 7 downgrade rights and get it, WinTabs end up on Woot! for 80% off as people wait around the block for iPad 5.awesome. Frankly Gabe at Valve will come out with a Steambox and drive another nail in the coffin for MSFT, Ballmer will retire declaring victory based on how many win 8 licenses sold (while ignoring that like Vista its just a DVD sitting in a box that nobody uses) and once fatboy is gone the board will bring in somebody with a brain, maybe lure Allchin or Ozzie back, and MSFT will become the new IBM.

So get over it friend, just let it go. MSFT won the desktop which is flatline and will stay that way, Google will lock down Android and they and Apple will control mobile with an iron hand, meanwhile you'll shake your fist at the old tiger in the corner wheezing and limping along because once upon a time they were actually scary.

Android share of the smartphone market is around 60%, roughly double that of Apple. Apple may have an "Iron hand", but that just means the more they tighten their grip, the more market share will slip through their fingers.

Of course, this is phones shipped and not phones sold. Nobody actually buys an Android phone, they get it free with their plan.

I often wondered why the telcos don't pass on their cost by rolling it into the subscription charges.

Because if they did that, it would have to be a line item that they charged you for on the bill. And then, after the "contract period" expired, they wouldn't have grounds to continue charging you the same price, in spite of the fact that you "repaid" the subsidy a long, long time ago.

Dude - you are a supreme troll for trotting out that graph. I mean, can you even read the damn thing? Are you capable of objective thinking?

ICP has hitting the OEM rollout over the last few months and everyone and their brother is holding their breath for iPhone 5 -- It should be out this fall. So it only goes that the sales numbers will decline, it's SV tradition -- just look to the Osbourne.

Paste that graph again in November and talk to us then about how the Smartphone Market is slipping through Apple's "

Wow that's a thoughtful, complex post. Let's deal with these issues one at a time.

Para 1: Bill is gone. Bill Gates remains the chairman of the board at Microsoft [microsoft.com], and hand-picked all the other board members - who pick the CEO and evaluate his performance, give him goals and guidance, set his pay, bonuses and options, and set policy. Bill is still very much responsible for what goes on there, and weighs in on every big decision.

Para 2: Steve Ballmer. You neglected to mention the sea of red ink [businessinsider.com] that is Microsoft's Online Services Division. I happen to like the direction Steve Ballmer is taking Microsoft. Clearly this is a man with vision [youtube.com] and purpose who is ready and able to take the company where I want it to go. It takes Marvel Comics level superpowers to get rid of this much cash flow, to destroy a 42 percent success in mobile market share from 2007 [wikipedia.org] given their advantages and high hopes [macdailynews.com], to so capably destroy the morale and productivity [slashdot.org] of the world's best developers, to put a company with this much income in $55B of debt [google.com]. So let's lay off of Steve-o, mmkay? I like him where he is, sweaty shirt and all.

Para 3: No more Big, Bad MS. With the OOXML debacle [groklaw.net] that nearly ruined ISO, their recent rape of Nokia [blogs.com], their current ongoing rape of OEMs [computerworld.com], retail vendors [zdnet.com] of both their products and Windows PCs, their planned rape of software distributor partners [cnn.com], developers and competing independent software vendors and much much more they prove every day that they have not changed. Last week they confirmed they're going to murder the advertisers they bought relationships with in an acquisition by making "Do Not Track" the default [arstechnica.com] in IE. Just yesterday [pcworld.com] it came out that the new replacement for Hotmail, Outlook.com is incompatible with Android. The "new kinder, gentler Microsoft" is a myth. They have now declared war on absolutely everybody on Earth, including the people who pay for their products and excepting only the Women's Temperance Union [wikipedia.org] and media executives [wikipedia.org]. Naturally this means I expect them to announce an embedded bittorent feature for IE that involves a drinking game next.

Obviously they'll take share and make money by making Windows not work as well on the hardware of their OEM competitors.

At least they still allow Windows to run on third-party hardware. Their major competitor in the tablet market, and second largest vendor of PCs and laptops, is not so generous. Yet no-one complains about that...

Windows is one of the only things that actually brings Microsoft profit.

And do you think it will continue to do so on the tablet? There is nothing about Microsoft Tablet that says, "yes, people will by this in hoards." Who do you know that is planning on standing in line on the release day for a Microsoft Tablet?

True, but the plan of developing software, prototyping hardware and hoping the 3rd party manufacturers would make something materialize that was worth buying didn't work, and they tried that plan for 10 years.

Trying something else may not go anywhere either. But clearly the last plan didn't work, and somehow android has been adopted for slate form factors even though no one ever tried that with windows, when it could have been tried* years before the iPad. I suspect this is microsofts way of negotiating with it's hardware providers, they better get off their collective arses and start at least trying different things, or microsoft will.

*caveats. Yes they had convertible tablets, I've owned several over the years and they worked quite well for a lot of things. And yes, they had slate form prototypes in what, 2002, but no one tried to market those for whatever reason.

ok, your post is showing your biases, and makes you sound like an idiot racist. Clearly you have a bias against people with kids.

Because that's what Microsoft stores have become, a babysitting shop. They tend to have a lot of people, but look around, they majority tend to be people with kids. And those kids want to play the X-boxes, though maybe not buy them. And the parents look trashy because, well, they don't care what people think about them anymore. Which is a good thing.

The pro version should cost much more than 200. They will include Intel processors, fully fledged windows 8 and be capable of running desktop software. including modern games. A good reference for the pro Surface tablets is the Samsung Series 7 Slate. It starts around 1000 dollars. I don't expect the Surface equivalents to be below 600 to 800.

There is no way that they will sell this product for less than the entry-level iPad. First, they don't have the volume to get the parts any cheaper than Apple does. Second, pricing something too cheaply influences the buyer into thinking they are getting a shitty product.

Apple will formally announce and show off a new version when it's ready, and usually has it available in the shops the next day. Everything else is just rumours, but it continues to surprise me how much Apple lives up to the rumours. They live up more to unofficial rumours, than MS lives up to their own pre-product announcements.

Everybody knows a company will not stop developing when a product is out. But announcing and starting to show off a successor changes the game a lot, as it gives people something co

Actually, a more accurate statement would probably be "it sucks to own stock in a Windows OEM right now". It's pretty obvious Microsoft intends to emulate Apple; and, if everything goes according to plan, the OEMs will all shrivel up and die.

Not very well. Have you ever heard Apple discussing the next version of their product before the current version ships? No, Apple is much too smart to do that. Every new Apple product is the greatest thing ever and all focus is on that greatness and how everyone needs to get that greatness now. Even as the last product ages and it becomes clear to everyone that Apple must be getting close to releasing the next version, they keep it mum until they can announce it with huge fanfare as the new greatest thi

I think this has a lot to do with FUD no longer working so well for Microsoft. There was a time when they just had to annouce that they were planning to develop something along the lines of XY and everybody in the market for XY got scared shitless. Competitors stopped actual development on their version of XY (because if MS was developing it, they had no chance) and customers would wait for MSs version of XY because it would become the standard. This worked well for a very long time.

If MS makes a version they have a big advantage in cost. OEMs have very thin margins as it is. MS making computers will pay a lot less for Win 8 as it will be an internal cost. Even if OEMs pay as little as $20 for Win 8, that's $20 MS doesn't have to pay.

Especially if Microsoft sells them at or below cost so as to get people interested kind of like amazons does with their kindles and kindle fire expecting people to spend money on apps and make up their profit there.

OEMs might offer/push Win 7 instead of Win 8 as payback. That way MS doesn't get a larger install base of Win 8. As an OEM, I would do this for practical reasons if I don't offer many touch products and I won't have to get as many support calls.

I'm not buying a Surface 1.0.I'll wait for the Surface 2.0 instead.--"The name comes from the planned replacement of the Osborne 1 computer. In 1983 founder Adam Osborne pre-announced several next-generation computer models (the "Executive" and "Vixen" models), which had not yet been built, highlighting the fact that they would outperform the existing model. A widely-held belief was that sales of the Osborne 1 fell sharply as customers anticipated those more advanced systems, and dealers cancelled orders." And the company went bankrupt.

Other examples:"In 1978, North Star Computers announced a new version of their floppy disk controller, which had double the capacity, to be sold at the same price as their existing range. Sales of the existing products plummeted and the company almost went bankrupt."

"When Sega began publicly discussing their next-generation system, barely two years after launching the Saturn, it became a self-defeating prophecy. This move, combined with Sega's recent history of short-lived consoles, led to a chain reaction that quickly caused the Saturn's future to collapse. Immediately following the announcement, sales of the console and software substantially tapered off in the second half of 1997, while many planned games were canceled, causing the console's life expectancy to shorten substantially."

Really, they need to be more tight lipped. One of Apple's points is that they don't leak, so they don't lose sales "waiting". You can't "go back" and get money customers didn't spend this quarter... It's gone. People that wait generally didn't keep the money handy, so they don't buy "more".

Apple is already citing that as a reason for diminished quarter... Because everybody KNOWS we get a new iPhone, iPad, iPod each year.

The obvious question is that if Surface 1.0 isn't released, why are they working on 2.0? Microsoft hasn't released ANY Surface yet... Stop assuming anybody will care about the NEXT one... Or worse, what features are they going to leave OUT? This becomes like iOS updates where people get upset when only this YEAR's model gets all the new features.

The other thing is we know Microsoft's announcements are full of shit - just look at what Longhorn was supposed to already be doing in 2002 and Windows 8 can't do yet in 2012. I don't think this is going to slow things down because not many people are going to believe it until they see some actual hardware instead of some ad with a magic table.

Really, they need to be more tight lipped. One of Apple's points is that they don't leak, so they don't lose sales "waiting".

By now, everybody knows that iPhone and iPad get refreshed in one year cycles. The only thing you don't know in advance is what, exactly, will change in the next version. But then you don't know this here, either.

The obvious question is that if Surface 1.0 isn't released, why are they working on 2.0?

Because there is enough manpower to work on both?

Stop assuming anybody will care about the NEXT one

They call it a "bet". If you bet right, you can sometimes get a pretty spectacular pay-iff.

By now, everybody knows that iPhone and iPad get refreshed in one year cycles. The only thing you don't know in advance is what, exactly, will change in the next version. But then you don't know this here, either.

Apple has been pretty consistent in ensuring that at least two devices into the past are supported. This means that even if you buy the previous version of an iPad around when the new one is launched, or even up to a year later, you can be pretty sure that you will be looked after for most of the lifetime of your device. One of the biggest problems with Android devices and the best reason to buy a Nexus is that only Google has been similarly reliable with future support. Microsoft, on the other hand has

Most likely either x86 or ARM will be killed. There's no way that such a tiny ecosystem can support the level of fragmentation which two processor architectures with totally different power characteristics suggest.

Why, if that level of fragmentation is largely transparent to both the users and the developers?

The "totally different power characteristics" argument is also bogus. Did you miss Android phones running on x86 (Medfield), showing battery life pretty much in line with ARM? And Clover Field, which is specifically Intel's answer to ARM in tablets (Android and Win8 both).

Guess it's a bit like their close partner Nokia, with the famous Burning Platform memo

Maybe I'm just not boardroom savvy enough to comprehend the subtle inticracies of an executive master plan but what the hell was Elop thinking? They could have done any number of things to slowly build up excitement for their Windows Phones without taking the excruciatingly and so obviously disastrous step of Osbourning their still profitable at the time Symbian business. He had to know they were going to still support the Symbian handsets for years down the road. There was the PureView that was in the l

Remember, even in a private company, the CEO doesn't have full decision power. The board can effectively overrule him and he can't get rid of the people under him or fully control them without the board's support. A number of those people probably looked at Microsoft's history in mobile (Microsoft's market share has continually declined overall in mobile [wmpoweruser.com] having previously been in double digits) and foresaw disaster.

Elop was setting out to destroy the power base of people who might try to push for backup

what was he thinking? he was making public moves to ensure that n9 would tank and that symbian would tank faster than it would(they still sold more symbians than wp's in last quarter, mind you, and were selling symbians more than ever when he made the speech). that way he made sure he could override the board and internal advisors on what to use the marketing budget for(essentially for a product they weren't even shipping yet, funny that).

Actually I think the Sega example is a better analogy as like Sega MSFT is notorious from just walking away from products, see Zune, Kin, Sidekick, and from the looks of it anybody who buys a WinPhone 7 won't get the Win 8 update...so why in the hell would you buy a MSFT mobile product? Answer: you shouldn't.

At least with X86 Windows you know to the day when its EOL thanks to the corporate agreements and their own roadmap but with mobile the only way buying a MSFT device would be worth it is if you got i

I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly why Slashdot posted this article. Every company with a serious product is obviously going to be developing future versions, this really isn't news, but there's nothing like trying to amplify the message and pretend it's journalism anyway.

It's an interesting thought that you are totally right. If I see a quote in quotation marks without an attribution I immediately know that it's from Wikipedia. That is an amazing level of cultural power when you can start to change the rules of grammar and citation.

They have not yet released version 1.0.They didn't let reviewers at their media event actually use it.They're already announcing version 2.0.Me thinks v1.0 was the alpha to test the waters and they found serious problems.

They did not announce a version 2, they announced job application spots for a later generation of Surface devices. Not only could this be referring to other kinds of Surface devices, but even if it was an updated version of the first it shouldn't come as a surprise that Microsoft is planning newer devices.
Personally I would find it a whole lot more strange if they weren't developing newer possible versions of their products.

Precisely. So they announce rumors for what isn't announced while they don't sell what isn't available. v1.0 may never make it to actual consumer hands - Microsoft has done that before. Meanwhile they'll either drop it saying the market isn't there (as demonstrated by the totally failed iPad, iPhone, iPod) or they'll bring out 2.0 and call it 1.x or just change the name. Microsoft's afraid to get in the water.

Totally agreed. They probably did so already. If I were to consider to buy a Windows based tablet, I'd be waiting for the Surface (in a parallel universe or so, you never know, in this universe I'm not even considering to buy a tablet to begin with).

And even in this universe, I'm interested in it. Not to buy, just normal curiousity. The specs are very interesting, the form factor is different from anything else currently on the markt. That's interesting.

To me, it seems to be a giant detour to convince us to use only "Trusted" computing. Tablets are computers, only artificially limited and overpriced. We (consumers) are footing the bill for a future where all platforms will be walled garden monopolies. If you like it, kudos to you. I am not touching closed system with a 10 miles pole as I do not want my children to live in a world where computing is limited and watered down.

Simple user interfaces have a place, but why insisting on getting down the throat o

Real linux on an x86 tablet would be nice. It means you can use a pile of software NOW without having to port it slowly bit by bit to android. There isn't even a decent X on android yet, although that's slowly getting there. Something like Seismic Un*x (http://www.cwp.mines.edu/cwpcodes/) would be wonderful on a tablet but probably a five year nightmare porting it and all it's dependencies to android.

See above for the note on porting, which unfortunately applies to different families of CPU as well as different operating systems. Even after porting I'm not sure how floating point performance is on ARM these days either, but it sucked previously simply because that's not what the ARM chips were designed to do.I'm not knocking linux on ARM - I bought a phone with that.

Reminds me of how the news covers a high-profile trial. "THIS JUST IN! The judge sat down." then "BREAKING NEWS: the prosecutor called a witness!" then "ANOTHER UPDATE: the defense called a witness". then "MORE BREAKING NEWS: Prosecutor says suspect is guilty." "EXCLUSIVE NEW INFO: Defense attorney says accused is innocent." "YET MORE NEWS: the witness sneezed and had to get a tissue." This goes on for days and days and weeks and weeks. Sometimes months.

I wish they'd just shut the fuck up until it's all over and a verdict has been reached, then report on that. Once. If I missed it and it's important to me then I can Google the story later. Quit pretending this minutia is exciting. It isn't, unless you have no life, no significant other, no friends, no meaningful work, and no hobbies. Then the constant micro-updates might be a big deal to you but I wouldn't exactly call that a good thing.

That's what these constant not-yet-released product updates are like.

Aha! Well.. this behavior is profitable for both news companies and software companies, it is some kind of symbiotic relationship. So yeah, we will have to live with it:)